I'm saying this for years now and people think I hate templates as a concept. I only dislike template systems like Smarty. Ever since I learned that there is a {php}{/php} tag in Smarty, I new the system was broken.

The issue with Smarty is that it is yet another syntax to learn. A PHP template system that uses PHP for the logic and control structures makes a lot more sense IMO.

I don't really think Smarty has anything to do with this. Though I do agree on the "one of the worst examples" point.

Well apparently this is not a popular opinion around here but I actually like Smarty when the situation calls for it. In version 3 the "block" feature makes Smarty templates somewhat similar to .NET "Master Pages". I personally like using Smarty as the View in an MVC pattern. I've even used it for email message templates.

I have one reason for not using Smarty in my more recent work but it has nothing to do with my feelings about Smarty itself. Rather just that a lot of web apps lately have all of the view logic in the client. So the server rendering of the view is often just outputting mostly static HTML for the Javascript to use as it's starting point. So it's not that I dislike Smarty, it's just that there's barely any logic at all happening at that level so there's no need for it.

I used to use smarty for all my projects. Mostly because I had designers working on them and it was easier for them to read/manage.

But, you can make just as readable code without smarty and load times are much faster (although smarty does have a caching system).